The ice crop
The ice crop
The ice-cart with its weighty tongs never climbs our Hill, yet the icechest does not lack its clear blue cake of frozen February. We gather our own ice as we gather our own hay and apples. The small ice-house under the trees has just been packed with eighteen tons of "black" ice, sawed and split into even blocks, tier on tier, the harvest of the curing cold, as loft and cellar are still filled with crops made in the summer's curing heat. So do the seasons overlap and run together! So do they complement and multiply each other! Like the star-dust of Saturn they belt our fourteen-acre planet, not with three rings, nor four, but with twelve, a ring for every month, a girdle of twelve shining circles running round the year—the tinkling ice of February in the goblet of October!—the apples of October red and ripe on what might have been April's empty platter!
He who sows the seasons and gathers the months into ice-house and barn lives not from sunup to sundown, revolving with the hands of the clock, but, heliocentric, makes a daily circuit clear around the sun—the smell of mint in the hay-mow, a reminder of noontime passed; the prospect of winter in the growing garden, a gentle warning of night coming on. Twelve times one are twelve—by so many times are months and meanings and values multiplied for him whose fourteen acres bring forth abundantly—provided that the barns on the place be kept safely small.
Big barns are an abomination unto the Lord, and without place on a wise man's estate. As birds have nests, and foxes dens, so may any man have a place to lay his head, with amansionprepared in the sky for his soul.
Big barns are as foolish for the ice-man as for others. The barns of an ice-man must needs be large, yet they are over-large if he can say to his soul: "Soul, thou hast much ice laid up for many days; eat, drink, and be merry among the cakes"—and when the autumn comes he still has a barn full of solid cemented cakes that must be sawed out! No soul can be merry long on ice—nor on sugar, nor shoes, nor stocks, nor hay, nor anything of that sort in great quantities. He who builds great barns for ice, builds a refrigerator for his soul. Ice must never become a man's only crop; for then winter means nothing but ice; and the year nothing but winter; for the year's never at the spring for him, but always at February or when the ice is making and the mercury is down to zero.
As I have already intimated, a safe kind of ice-house is one like mine, that cannot hold more than eighteen tons—a year's supply (shrinkage and Sunday ice-cream and other extras provided for). Such an ice-house is not only an ice-house, it is also an act of faith, an avowal of confidence in the stability of the frame of things, and in their orderly continuance. Another winter will come, it proclaims, when the ponds will be pretty sure to freeze. If they don't freeze, and never do again—well, who has an ice-house big enough in that event?
My ice-house is one of life's satisfactions; not architecturally, of course, for there has been no great development yet in ice-house lines, and this one was home-done; it is a satisfaction morally, being one thing I have done that is neither more nor less. I have the big-barn weakness—the desire for ice—for ice to melt—as if I were no wiser than the ice-man! I builded bigger than I knew when I put the stone porches about the dwelling-house, consulting in my pride the architect first instead of the town assessors. I took no counsel of pride in building the ice-house, nor of fear, nor of my love of ice. I said: "I will build me a house to carry a year's supply of ice and no more, however the price of ice may rise, and even with the risk of facing seven hot and iceless years. I have laid up enough things among the moths and rust. Ice against the rainy day I will provide, but ice for my children and my children's children, ice for a possible cosmic reversal that might twist the equator over the poles, I will not provide for. Nor will I go into the ice business."
Nor did I! And I say the building of that ice-house has been an immense satisfaction to me. I entertain my due share of
"Gorgons, and hydras and chimaeras dire";
but a cataclysm of the proportions mentioned above would as likely as not bring on another Ice Age, or indeed—
". . . run back and fetch the Age of Gold."
To have an ice-house, and yourself escape cold storage—that seems to me the thing.
I can fill the house in a single day, and so trade a day for a year; or is it not rather that I crowd a year into a day? Such days are possible. It is not any day that I can fill the ice-house. Ice-day is a chosen, dedicated day, one of the year's high festivals, the Day of First Fruits, the ice crop being the year's earliest harvest. Hay is made when the sun shines, a condition sometimes slow in coming; but ice of the right quality and thickness, with roads right, and sky right for harvesting, requires a conjunction of right conditions so difficult as to make a good ice-day as rare as a day in June. June! why, June knows no such glorious weather as that attending the harvest of the ice.
This year it fell early in February—rather late in the season; so late, in fact, that, in spite of my faith in winter, I began to grow anxious—something no one on a hill in Hingham need ever do. Since New Year's Day unseasonable weather had prevailed: shifty winds, uncertain skies, rain and snow and sleet—that soft, spongy weather when the ice soaks and grows soggy. By the middle of January what little ice there had been in the pond was gone, and the ice-house was still empty.
Toward the end of the month, however, the skies cleared, the wind settled steadily into the north, and a great quiet began to deepen over the fields, a quiet that at night grew so tense you seemed to hear the close-glittering heavens snapping with the light of the stars. Everything seemed charged with electric cold; the rich soil of the garden struck fire like flint beneath your feet; the tall hillside pines, as stiff as masts of steel, would suddenly crack in the brittle silence, with a sharp report; and at intervals throughout the taut boreal night you could hear a hollow rumbling running down the length of the pond—the ice being split with the wide iron wedge of the cold.
Down and down for three days slipped the silver column in the thermometer until at eight o'clock on the fourth day it stood just above zero. Cold? It was splendid weather! with four inches of ice on the little pond behind the ridge, glare ice, black as you looked across it, but like a pane of plate glass as you peered into it at the stirless bottom below; smooth glare ice untouched by the wing of the wind or by even the circling runner of the skater-snow. Another day and night like this and the solid square-edged blocks could come in.
I looked at the glass late that night and found it still falling. I went on out beneath the stars. It may have been the tightened telephone wires overhead, or the frozen ground beneath me ringing with the distant tread of the coming north wind, yet over these, and with them, I heard the singing of a voiceless song, no louder than the winging hum of bees, but vaster—the earth and air responding to a starry lyre as some Aeolian harper, sweeping through the silvery spaces of the night, brushed the strings with her robes of jeweled cold.
The mercury stood at zero by one o'clock. A biting wind had risen and blew all the next day. Eight inches of ice by this time. One night more and the crop would be ripe. And it was ripe.
I was out before the sun, tramping down to the pond with pike and saw, the team not likely to be along for half an hour yet, the breaking of the marvelous day all mine. Like apples of gold in baskets of silver were the snow-covered ridges in the light of the slow-coming dawn. The wind had fallen, but the chill seemed the more intense, so silently it took hold. My breath hung about me in little gray clouds, covering my face, and even my coat, with rime. As the hurt passed from my fingers, my eyebrows seemed to become detached, my cheeks shrunk, my flesh suddenly free of cumbering clothes. But in half a minute the rapid red blood would come beating back, spreading over me and out from me, with the pain, and then the glow, of life, of perfect life that seemed itself to feed upon the consuming cold.
No other living thing was yet abroad, no stir or sound except the tinkling of tiny bells all about me that were set to swinging as I moved along. The crusted snow was strewn with them; every twig was hung, and every pearl-bent grass blade. Then off through the woods rang the chime of louder bells, sleigh bells; then the shrill squeal of iron runners over dry snow; then the broken voices of men; and soon through the winding wood road came the horses, their bay coats white, as all things were, with the glittering dust of the hoar frost.
It was beautiful work. The mid-afternoon found us in the thick of a whirling storm, the grip of the cold relaxed, the woods abloom with the clinging snow. But the crop was nearly in. High and higher rose the cold blue cakes within the ice-house doors until they touched the rafter plate.
It was hard work. The horses pulled hard; the men swore hard, now and again, and worked harder than they swore. They were rough, simple men, crude and elemental like their labor. It was elemental work—filling a house with ice, three hundred-pound cakes of clean, clear ice, cut from the pond, skidded into the pungs, and hauled through the woods all white, and under a sky all gray, with softly-falling snow. They earned their penny; and I earned my penny, and I got it, though I asked only the wages of going on from dawn to dark, down the crystal hours of the day.
Seed catalogues
Seed catalogues
"The new number of the 'Atlantic' came to-day," She said, stopping by the table. "It has your essay in it."
"Yes?" I replied, only half hearing.
"You have seen it, then?"
"No"—still absorbed in my reading.
"What is it you are so interested in?" she inquired, laying down the new magazine.
"A seed catalogue."
"More seed catalogues! Why, you read nothing else last night."
"But this is a new one," I replied, "and I declare I never saw turnips that could touch this improved strain here. I am going to plant a lot of them this year."
"How many seed catalogues have you had this spring?"
"Only six, so far."
"And you plant your earliest seeds—"
"In April, the middle of April, though I may be able to get my first peas in by the last of March. You see peas"—she was backing away—"this new Antarctic Pea—will stand a lot of cold; but beans—do come here, and look at these Improved Kentucky Wonder Pole Beans!" holding out the wonderfully lithographed page toward her. But she backed still farther away, and, putting her hands behind her, looked at me instead, and very solemnly.
I suppose every man comes to know that unaccountable expression in his wife's eyes soon or late: a sad, baffled expression, detached, remote, as of things seen darkly, or descried afar off; an expression which leaves you feeling that you are afar off,—discernible, but infinitely dwindled. Two minds with but a single thought—so you start; but soon she finds, or late, that as the heavens are high above the earth, so are some of your thoughts above her thoughts. She cannot follow. On the brink she stands and sees you, through the starry spaces, drift from her ken in your fleet of—seed catalogues.
I have never been able to explain to her the seed catalogue. She is as fond of vegetables as I, and neither of us cares much for turnips—nor for carrots, nor parsnips either, when it comes to that, our two hearts at the table beating happily as one. Born in the country, she inherited a love of the garden, but a feminine garden, the gardenparvus, minor, minimus—so many cut-worms long, so many cut-worms wide. I love a garden of size, a garden that one cut-worm cannot sweep down upon in the night.
For years I have wanted to be a farmer, but there in the furrow ahead of me, like a bird on its nest, she has sat with her knitting; and when I speak of loving long rows to hoe, she smiles and says, "For theboysto hoe." Her unit of garden measure is a meal—so many beet seeds for a meal; so many meals for a row, with never two rows of anything, with hardly a full-length row of anything, and with all the rows of different lengths, as if gardening were a sort of geometry or a problem in arithmetic, figuring your vegetable with the meal for a common divisor—how many times it will go into all your rows without leaving a remainder!
Now I go by the seed catalogue, planting, not after the dish, as if my only vision were a garden peeled and in the pot, but after the Bush., Peck, Qt., Pt., Lb., Oz., Pkg.,—so many pounds to the acre, instead of so many seeds to the meal.
And I have tried to show her that gardening is something of a risk, attended by chance, and no such exact science as dressmaking; that you cannot sow seeds as you can sew buttons; that the seed-man has no machine for putting sure-sprout-humps into each of his minute wares as the hook-and-eye-man has; that with all wisdom and understanding one could do no better than to buy (as I am careful to do) out of that catalogue whose title reads "Honest Seeds"; and that even the Sower in Holy Writ allowed somewhat for stony places and other inherent hazards of planting time.
But she follows only afar off, affirming the primary meaning of that parable to be plainly set forth in the context, while the secondary meaning pointeth out the folly of sowing seed anywhere save on good ground—which seemed to be only about one quarter of the area in the parable that was planted; and that anyhow, seed catalogues, especially those in colors, designed as they are to catch the simple-minded and unwary, need to be looked into by the post-office authorities and if possible kept from all city people, and from college professors in particular.
She is entirely right about the college professors. Her understanding is based upon years of observation and the patient cooking of uncounted pots of beans.
I confess to a weakness for gardening and no sense at all of proportion in vegetables. I can no more resist a seed catalogue than a toper can his cup. There is no game, no form of exercise, to compare for a moment in my mind with having a row of young growing things in a patch of mellow soil; no possession so sure, so worth while, so interesting as a piece of land. The smell of it, the feel of it, the call of it, intoxicate me. The rows are never long enough, nor the hours, nor the muscles strong enough either, when there is hoeing to do.
Why should she not take it as a solemn duty to save me from the hoe? Man is an immoderate animal, especially in the spring when the doors of his classroom are about to open for him into the wide and greening fields. There is only one place to live,—here in the hills of Hingham; and there is nothing better to do here or anywhere, than the hoeing, or the milking, or the feeding of the hens.
A professor in the small college of Slimsalaryville tells in a recent magazine of his long hair and no dress suit, and of his wife's doing the washing in order that they might have bread and the "Eugenic Review" on a salary of twelve hundred dollars a year. It is a sad story, in the midst of which he exclaims: "I may even get to the place where I canspare time(italics mine) to keep chickens or a cow, and that would help immensely; but I am so constituted that chickens or a cow would certainly cripple my work." How cripple it? Is n't it his work toteach? Far from it. "Let there be light," he says at the end of the essay, is his work, and he adds that he has been so busy with it that he is on the verge of a nervous break-down. Of course he is. Who would n't be with that job? And of course he has n't a constitution for chickens and a cow. But neither does he seem to have constitution enough for the light-giving either, being ready to collapse from his continuous shining.
But isn't this the case with many of us? Aren't we overworking—doing our own simple job of teaching and, besides that, taking upon ourselves the Lord's work of letting there be light?
I have come to the conclusion that there might not be any less light were the Lord allowed to do his own shining, and that probably there might be quite as good teaching if the teacher stuck humbly to his desk, and after school kept chickens and a cow. The egg-money and cream "would help immensely," even the Professor admits, the Professor's wife fully concurring no doubt.
Don't we all take ourselves a little seriously—we college professors and others? As if the Lord could not continue to look after his light, if we looked after our students! It is only in these last years that I have learned that I can go forth unto my work and to my labor until the evening, quitting then, and getting home in time to feed the chickens and milk the cow. I am a professional man, and I dwell in the midst of professional men, all of whom are inclined to help the Lord out by working after dark—all of whom are really in dire constitutional need of the early roosting chickens and the quiet, ruminating cow.
To walk humbly with the hens, that's the thing—after the classes are dismissed and the office closed. To get out of the city, away from books, and theories, and students, and patients, and clients, and customers—back to real things, simple, restful, healthful things for body and soul, homely domestic things that lay eggs at 70 cents per dozen, and make butter at $2.25 the 5-pound box! As for me, this does "help immensely," affording me all necessary hair-cuts (I don't want the "Eugenic Review"), and allowing Her to send the family washing (except the flannels) to the laundry.
Instead of crippling normal man's normal work, country living (chickens and a cow) will prevent his work from crippling him—keeping him a little from his students and thus saving him from too much teaching; keeping him from reading the "Eugenic Review" and thus saving him from too much learning; curing him, in short, of his "constitution" that is bound to come to some sort of a collapse unless rested and saved by chickens and a cow.
"By not too many chickens," she would add; and there is no one to match her with a chicken—fried, stewed, or turned into pie.
The hens are no longer mine, the boys having taken them over; but the gardening I can't give up, nor the seed catalogues.
The one in my hands was exceptionally radiant, and exceptionally full of Novelties and Specialties for the New Year, among them being an extraordinary new pole bean—an Improved Kentucky Wonder. She had backed away, as I have said, and instead of looking at the page of beans, looked solemnly at me; then with something sorrowful, something somewhat Sunday-like in her voice, an echo, I presume, of lessons in the Catechism, she asked me—
"Who makes you plant beans?"
"My dear," I began, "I—"
"How many meals of pole beans did we eat last summer?"
"I—don't—re—"
"Three—just three," she answered. "And I think you must remember how many of that row of poles we picked?"
"Why, yes, I—"
"Three—just three out of thirty poles! Now, do you think you remember how many bushels of those beans went utterly unpicked?"
I was visibly weakening by this time.
"Three—do you think?"
"Multiply that three by three-times-three! And now tell me—"
But this was too much.
"My dear," I protested, "I recollect exactly. It was—"
"No, I don't believe you do. I cannot trust you at all with beans. But I should like to know why you plant ten or twelve kinds of beans when the only kind we like are limas!"
"Why—the—catalogue advises—"
"Yes, the catalogue advises—"
"You don't seem to understand, my dear, that—"
"Now,whydon't I understand?"
I paused. This is always a hard question, and peculiarly hard as the end of a series, and on a topic as difficult as beans. I don't know beans. There is little or nothing about beans in the history of philosophy or in poetry. Thoreau says that when he was hoeing his beans it was not beans that he hoed nor he that hoed beans—which was the only saying that came to mind at the moment, and under the circumstances did not seem to help me much.
"Well," I replied, fumbling among my stock of ready-made reasons, "I—really—don't—know exactly why you don't understand. Indeed, I really don't know—thatIexactly understand.Everythingis full of things that even I can't understand—how to explain my tendency to plant all kinds of beans, for instance; or my 'weakness,' as you call it, for seed catalogues; or—"
She opened her magazine, and I hastened to get the stool for her feet. As I adjusted the light for her she said:—
"Let me remind you that this is the night of the annual banquet of your Swampatalk Club; you don't intend to forego that famous roast beef for the seed catalogues?"
"I did n't intend to, but I must say that literature like this is enough to make a man a vegetarian. Look at that page for an old-fashioned New England Boiled Dinner! Such carrots. Reallytheylook good enough to eat. I think I 'll plant some of those improved carrots; and some of these parsnips; and some—"
"You had better go get ready," she said, "and please put that big stick on the fire for me," drawing the lamp toward her, as she spoke, so that all of its green-shaded light fell over her—over the silver in her hair, with its red rose; over the pink and lacy thing that wrapped her from her sweet throat to the silver stars on her slippers.
"I'm not going to that Club!" I said. "I have talked myself for three hours to-day, attended two conferences, and listened to one address. There were three different societies for the general improving of things that met at the University halls to-day with big speakers from the ends of the earth. To-morrow night I address The First Century Club in the city after a dinner with the New England Teachers of English Monthly Luncheon Club—and I would like to know what we came out here in the woods for, anyhow?"
"If you are going—" She was speaking calmly.
"Going where?" I replied, picking up the seed catalogues to make room for myself on the couch. "Pleaselook at this pumpkin! Think of what a jack-o'-lantern it would make for the boys! I am going to plant—"
"You 'll be cold," she said, rising and drawing a steamer rug up over me; then laying the open magazine across my shoulders while giving the pillow a motherly pull, she added, with a sigh of contentment:—
"Perhaps, if it had n't been for me, you might have been a great success with pumpkins or pigs—I don't know."
The Dustless-Duster
The Dustless-Duster
There are beaters, brooms and Bissell's Sweepers; there are dry-mops, turkey-wings, whisks, and vacuum-cleaners; there are—but no matter. Whatever other things there are, and however many of them in the closet, the whole dust-raising kit is incomplete without the Dustless-Duster.
For the Dustless-Duster is final, absolute. What can be added to, or taken away from, a Dustless-Duster? A broom is only a broom, even a new broom. Its sphere is limited; its work is partial. Dampened and held persistently down by the most expert of sweepers, the broom still leaves something for the Dustless-Duster to do. But the Dustless-Duster leaves nothing for anything to do. The dusting is done.
Because there are many who dust, and because they have searched in vain for a dustless-duster, I should like to say that the Dustless-Duster can be bought at department stores, at those that have a full line of departments—at any department store, in fact; for the Dustless-Duster department is the largest of all the departments, whatever the store. Ask for it of your jeweler, grocer, milliner. Ask for "The Ideal," "The Universal," "The Indispensable," of any man with anything to sell or preach or teach, and you shall have it—the perfect thing which you have spent life looking for; which you have thought so often to have, but found as often that you had not. You shall have it. I have it. One hangs, rather, in the kitchen on the clothes-dryer.
And one (more than one) hangs in the kitchen closet, and in the cellar, and in the attic. I have often brought it home, for my search has been diligent since a certain day, years ago,—a "Commencement Day" at the Institute.
I had never attended a Commencement exercise before; I had never been in an opera house before; and the painted light through the roof of windows high overhead, the strains of the orchestra from far below me, the banks of broad-leaved palms, the colors, the odors, the confusion of flowers and white frocks, were strangely thrilling. Nothing had ever happened to me in the woods like this: the exaltation, the depression, the thrill of joy, the throb of pain, the awakening, the wonder, the purpose, and the longing! It was all a dream—all but the form and the face of one girl graduate, and the title of her essay, "The Real and the Ideal."
I do not know what large and lofty sentiments she uttered; I only remember the way she looked them. I did not hear the words she read; but I still feel the absolute fitness of her theme—how real her simple white frock, her radiant face, her dark hair! And how ideal!
I had seen perfection. Here was the absolute, the final, the ideal, the indispensable! And I was fourteen! Now I am past forty; and upon the kitchen clothes-dryer hangs the Dustless-Duster.
No, I have not lost the vision. The daughter of that girl, the image of her mother, slipped into my classroom the other day. Nor have I faltered in the quest. The search goes on, and must go on; for however often I get it, only to cast it aside, the indispensable, the ultimate, must continue to be indispensable and ultimate, until, some day—
What matters how many times I have had it, to discover every time that it is only a piece of cheesecloth, ordinary cheesecloth, dyed black and stamped with red letters? The search must go on, notwithstanding the clutter in the kitchen closet. The cellar is crowded with Dustless-Dusters, too; the garret is stuffed with them. There is little else besides them anywhere in the house. And this was an empty house when I moved into it, a few years ago.
As I moved in, an old man moved out, back to the city whence a few years before he had come; and he took back with him twelve two-horse wagon-loads of Dustless-Dusters. He had spent a long life collecting them, and now, having gathered all there were in the country, he was going back to the city, in a last pathetic, a last heroic, effort to find the one Dustless-Duster more.
It was the old man's twelve two-horse loads that were pathetic. There were many sorts of things in those twelve loads, of many lands, of many dates, but all of one stamp. The mark was sometimes hard to find, corroded sometimes nearly past deciphering, yet never quite gone. The red letters were indelible on every piece, from the gross of antique candle-moulds (against the kerosene's giving out) to an ancient coffin-plate, far oxidized, and engraved "Jones," which, the old man said, as he pried it off the side of the barn, "might come in handy any day."
The old man has since died and been laid to rest. Upon his coffin was set a new silver plate, engraved simply and truthfully, "Brown."
We brought nothing into this world, and it is certain, says Holy Writ, that we can carry nothing out. But it is also certain that we shall attempt to carry out, or try to find as soon as we are out, a Dustless-Duster. For we did bring something with us into this world, losing it temporarily, to be forever losing and finding it; and when we go into another world, will it not be to carry the thing with us there, or to continue there our eternal search for it? We are not so certain of carrying nothing out of this world, but we are certain of leaving many things behind.
Among those that I shall leave behind me is The Perfect Automatic Carpet-Layer. But I did not buy that. She did. It was one of the first of our perfections.
We have more now. I knew as I entered the house that night that something had happened; that the hope of the early dawn had died, for some cause, with the dusk. The trouble showed in her eyes: mingled doubt, chagrin, self-accusation, self-defense, defeat—familiar symptoms. She had seen something, something perfect, and had bought it.
I knew the look well, and the feelings all too well, and said nothing. For suppose I had been at home that day and she had been in town? Still, on my trip into town that morning I ran the risk of meeting the man who sold me "The Magic Stropless Razor Salve." No, not that man! I shall never meet him again, for vengeance is mine, saith theLord. But suppose I had met him? And suppose he had had some other salve,SafetyRazor Salve this time to sell?
It is for young men to see visions and for old men to dream dreams; but it is for no man or woman to buy one.
She had seen a vision, and had bought it—"The Perfect Automatic Carpet-Layer."
I kept silence, as I say, which is often a thoughtful thing to do.
"Are you ill?" she ventured, handing me my tea.
"No."
"Tired?"
"No."
"I hope you are not very tired, for the Parsonage Committee brought the new carpet this afternoon, and I have started to put it down. I thought we would finish it this evening. It won't be any work at all for you, for I—I—bought you one of these to-day to put it down with,"—pushing an illustrated circular across the table toward me.
No more carpet-laying bills. Do your own laying. No wrinkles. No crowded corners. No sore knees. No pounded fingers. No broken backs. Stand up and lay your carpet with the Perfect Automatic. Easy as sweeping. Smooth as putting paper on the wall. You hold the handle, and the Perfect Automatic does the rest. Patent Applied For. Price—
—but it was not the price! It was the tool—a weird hybrid tool, part gun, part rake, part catapult, part curry-comb, fit apparently for almost any purpose, from the business of blunderbuss to the office of an apple-picker. Its handle, which any child could hold, was somewhat shorter and thicker than a hoe-handle, and had a slotted tin barrel, a sort of intestine, on its ventral side along its entire length. Down this intestine, their points sticking through the slot, moved the tacks in single file to a spring-hammer close to the floor. This hammer was operated by a lever or tongue at the head of the handle, the connection between the hammer at the distal end and the lever at the proximal end being effected by means of a steel-wire spinal cord down the dorsal side of the handle. Over the fist of a hammer spread a jaw of sharp teeth to take hold of the carpet. The thing could not talk; but it could do almost anything else, so fearfully and wonderfully was it made.
As for laying carpets with it, any child could do that. But we did n't have any children then, and I had quite outgrown my childhood. I tried to be a boy again just for that night. I grasped the handle of the Perfect Automatic, stretched with our united strength, and pushed down on the lever. The spring-hammer drew back, a little trap or mouth at the end of the slotted tin barrel opened for the tack, the tack jumped out, turned over, landed point downward upon the right spot in the carpet, the crouching hammer sprang, and—
And then I lifted up the Perfect Automatic to see if the tack went in,—a simple act that any child could do, but which took automatically and perfectly all the stretch out of the carpet; for the hammer did not hit the tack; the tack really did not get through the trap; the trap did not open the slot; the slot—but no matter. We have no carpets now. The Perfect Automatic stands in the garret with all its original varnish on. At its feet sits a half-used can of "Beesene, The Prince of Floor Pastes."
We have only hard-wood floors now, which we treated, upon the strength of the label, with this Prince of Pastes, "Beesene"—"guaranteed not to show wear or dirt or to grow gritty; water-proof, gravel-proof. No rug will ruck on it, no slipper stick to it. Needs no weighted brush. Self-shining. The only perfect Floor Wax known. One box will do all the floors you have."
Indeed, half a box did all the floors we have. No slipper would stick to the paste, but the paste would stick to the slipper; and the greasy Prince did in spots all the floors we have: the laundry floor, the attic floor, and the very boards of the vegetable cellar.
I am young yet. I have not had time to collect my twelve two-horse loads. But I am getting them fast.
Only the other day a tall lean man came to the side door, asking after my four boys by name, and inquiring when my new book would be off the stocks, and, incidentally, showing me a patent-applied-for device called "The Fat Man's Friend."
"The Friend" was a steel-wire hoop, shaped and jointed like a pair of calipers, but knobbed at its points with little metal balls. The instrument was made to open and spring closed about the Fat Man's neck, and to hold, by means of a clasp on each side, a napkin, or bib, spread securely over the Fat Man's bosom.
"Ideal thing, now, is n't it?" said the agent, demonstrating with his handkerchief.
"Why—yes"—I hesitated—"for a fat man, perhaps."
"Just so," he replied, running me over rapidly with a professional eye; "but you know, Professor, that when a man's forty, or thereabouts, it's the nature of him to stouten. Once past forty he's liable to pick up any day. And when he starts, you know as well as I, Professor, when he starts there's nothing fattens faster than a man of forty. You ought to have one of these 'Friends' on hand."
"But fat does n't run in my family," I protested, my helpless, single-handed condition being plainly manifest in my tone.
"No matter," he rejoined, "look at me! Six feet three, and thin as a lath. I 'm what you might call a walking skeleton, ready to disjoint, as the poet says, and eat all my meals in fear, which I would do if 't wa'n't for this little 'Friend.' I can't eat without it. I miss it more when I am eatin' than I miss the victuals. I carry one with me all the time. Awful handy little thing. Now—"
"But—" I put in.
"Certainly," he continued, with the smoothest-running motor I ever heard, "but here's the point of the whole matter, as you might say.Thisthing is up to date, Professor. Now, the old-fashioned way of tying a knot in the corner of your napkin and anchoring it under your Adam's apple—that'sgone by. Also the stringed bib and safety-pin. Both those devices were crude—but necessary, of course, Professor—and inconvenient, and that old-fashioned knot really dangerous; for the knot, pressing against the Adam's apple, or the apple, as you might say, trying to swallow the knot—well, if there isn't less apoplexy and strangulation when this little Friend finds universal application, then I 'm no Prophet, as the Good Book says."
"But you see—" I broke in.
"I do, Professor. It's right here. I understand your objection. But it is purely verbal and academic, Professor. You are troubled concerning the name of this indispensable article. But you know, as well as I—even better with your education, Professor—that there 's nothing, absolutely nothing in a name. 'What's in a name?' the poet says. And I 'll agree with you—though, of course, it's confidential—that 'The Fat Man's Friend' is, as you literary folks would say, more or less of anom de plume. Isn't it? Besides,—if you 'll allow me the language, Professor,—it's too delimiting, restricting, prejudicing. Sets a lean man against it. But between us, Professor, they 're going to change the name of the next batch. They're—"
"Indeed!" I exclaimed; "what's the next batch going to be?"
"Oh, just the same—fifteen cents each—two for a quarter. You could n't tell them apart. You might just as well have one of these, and run no chances getting one of the next lot. They'll be precisely the same; only, you see, they're going to name the next ones 'Every Bosom's Friend,' to fit lean and fat, and without distinction of sex. Ideal thing now, is n't it? Yes, that's right—fifteen cents—two for twenty-five, Professor?—don't you want another for your wife?"
No, I did not want another for her. But ifshehad been at home, and I had been away, who knows but that all six of us had come off with a "Friend" apiece? They were a bargain by the half-dozen.
A bargain? Did anybody ever get a bargain—something worth more than he paid? Well—you shall, when you bring home a Dustless-Duster.
And who has not brought it home! Or who is not about to bring it home! Not all the years that I have searched, not all the loads that I have collected, count against the conviction that at last I have it—the perfect thing—until Ireachhome. But with several of my perfections I have never yet reached home, or I am waiting an opportune season to give them to my wife. I have been disappointed; but let no one try to tell me that there is no such thing as Perfection. Is not the desire for it the breath of my being? Is not the search for it the end of my existence? Is not the belief that at last I possess it—in myself, my children, my breed of hens, my religious creed, my political party—is not this conviction, I say, all there is of existence?
It is very easy to see that perfection is not in any of the other political parties. During a political campaign, not long since, I wrote to a friend in New Jersey,—
"Now, whatever your particular, personal brand of political faith, it is clearly your moral duty to vote this time the Democratic ticket."
Whereupon (and he is a thoughtful, God-fearing man, too) he wrote back,—
"As I belong to the only party of real reform, I shall stick to it this year, as I always have, and vote the straight ticket."
Is there a serener faith than this human faith in perfection? A surer, more unshakable belief than this human belief in the present possession of it?
There is only one thing deeper in the heart of man than his desire for completeness, and that is his conviction of being about to attain unto it. He dreams of completeness by night; works for completeness by day; buys it of every agent who comes along; votes for it at every election; accepts it with every sermon; and finds it—momentarily—every time he finds himself. The desire for it is the sweet spring of all his satisfactions; the possession of it the bitter fountain of many of his woes.
Apply the conviction anywhere, to anything—creeds, wives, hens—and see how it works out.
As tohens:—
There are many breeds of fairly good hens, and I have tried as many breeds as I have had years of keeping hens, but not until the poultry show, last winter, did I come upon the perfect hen. I had been working toward her through the Bantams, Brahmas, and Leghorns, to the Plymouth Rocks. I had tried the White and the Barred Plymouth Rocks, but they were not the hen. Last winter I came upon the originator of the Buff Plymouth Rocks—and here she was! I shall breed nothing henceforth but Buff Plymouth Rocks.
In the Buff Rock we have a bird of ideal size, neither too large nor too small, weighing about three pounds more than the undersized Leghorn, and about three pounds less than the oversized Brahma; we have a bird of ideal color, too—a single, soft, even tone, and no such barnyard daub as the Rhode Island Red; not crow-colored, either, like the Minorca; nor liable to all the dirt of the White Plymouth Rocks. Being a beautiful and uniform buff, this perfect Plymouth Rock is easily bred true to color, as the vari-colored fowls are not.
Moreover, the Buff Rock is a layer, isthelayer, maturing as she does about four weeks later than the Rhode Island Reds, and so escaping that fatal early fall laying with its attendant moult and eggless interim until March! On the other hand, the Buff Rock matures about a month earlier than the logy, slow-growing breeds, and so gets a good start before the cold and eggless weather comes.
And such an egg! There are white eggs and brown eggs, large and small eggs, but only one ideal egg—the Buff Rock's. It is of a soft lovely brown, yet whitish enough for a New York market, but brown enough, however, to meet the exquisite taste of the Boston trade. In fact it is neither white nor brown, but rather a delicate blend of the two—a new tone, indeed, a bloom rather, that I must call fresh-laid lavender.
So, at least, I am told. My pullets are not yet laying, having had a very late start last spring. But the real question, speaking professionally, with any breed of fowls is a market question: How do they dress? How do they eat?
If the Buff Plymouth Rock is an ideal bird in her feathers, she is even more so plucked. All white-feathered fowl, in spite of yellow legs, look cadaverous when picked. All dark-feathered fowl, with their tendency to green legs and black pin-feathers, look spotted, long dead, and unsavory. But the Buff Rock, a melody in color, shows that consonance, that consentaneousness, of flesh to feather that makes the plucked fowl to the feathered fowl what high noon is to the faint and far-off dawn—a glow of golden legs and golden neck, mellow, melting as butter, and all the more so with every unpicked pinfeather.
Can there be any doubt of the existence of hen-perfection? Any question of my having attained unto it—with the maturing of this new breed of hens?
For all spiritual purposes, that is, for all satisfactions, the ideal hen is the pullet—the Buff Plymouth Rock pullet.
Just so the ideal wife. If we could only keep them pullets!
The trouble we husbands have with our wives begins with our marrying them. There is seldom any trouble with them before. Our belief in feminine perfection is as profound and as eternal as youth. And the perfection is just as real as the faith. Youth is always bringing the bride home—to hang her on the kitchen clothes-dryer. She turns out to be ordinary cheese-cloth, dyed a more or less fast black—this perfection that he had stamped in letters of indelible red!
The race learns nothing. I learn, but not my children after me. They learn only after themselves. Already I hear my boys saying that their wives—! And the oldest of these boys has just turned fourteen!
Fourteen! the trouble all began at fourteen. No, the trouble began with Adam, though Eve has been responsible for much of it since. Adam had all that a man should have wanted in his perfect Garden. Nevertheless he wanted Eve. Eve in turn had Adam, a perfect man! but she wanted something more—if only the apple tree in the middle of the Garden. And we all of us were there in that Garden—with Adam thinking he was getting perfection in Eve; with Eve incapable of appreciating perfection in Adam. The trouble is human.
"Flounder, flounder in the sea,Prythee quickly come to me!For my wife, Dame Isabel,Wants strange things I scarce dare tell."